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The brain researcher Manfred Spitzer from Ulm warns that in lockdown irreparable deficits arise, for example in language acquisition.
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Ulm – What is missed at a certain age, children can sometimes find difficult to catch up later. This is what the brain researcher Manfred Spitzer tells our newspaper and is therefore critical of long-term day-care center and school closings. Daycare centers and schools are places where children learn essentials from each other. “One person demonstrates something and explains how it works, the other imitates it, may be corrected a few more times and then he can do it too. Learning couldn’t be faster! ”Says Spitzer, who researches as a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at the University of Ulm and has become known through books on learning for children. Dialogue with other children in daycare centers and schools is essential, especially for language acquisition, as are the stories and books that children are told and read aloud there.
“Until the age of three, the language centers learn the elementary sounds, words and rules of the language, and in the years after that, they mainly learn words. This requires a lot of language input, ”says Spitzer. An input that not all parents can offer their children, says the expert. Studies have shown that children from lower social classes often heard fewer than ten million words by the time they started school, while upper class children heard up to 40 million words. If kindergarten as a place for language teaching fails, this gap threatens to widen even further, with the corresponding consequences for school success, for example.
Young children learn compassion through being together
Another important neural development step in the preschool area are the connections between the language centers and the visual centers, which are formed around the age of five and six. “But only if these centers work together a lot, for example when presenting the contents of stories read aloud. Then these centers talk to each other all the time – and this is exactly how the connections between them arise, ”says the neuroscientist. Kindergartens played a crucial role in this, as well as in learning about togetherness and compassion.
Spitzer sees the possibilities of digital learning as limited, especially with younger children, because they “do not yet have the functioning frontal lobe that is needed for long self-regulation of attention”. Distance learning could also not contribute to “personality development”. Children cannot easily make up for what they have now missed because children’s brains are constantly developing. “That is exactly why it is important that learning is not canceled for a long time. And because this requires good teaching and teachers, it is very important that the schools reopen as soon as possible. “
Developmental psychologist
Developmental psychologist Heike M. Buhl from the University of Paderborn also sees so-called “social learning” at risk in times of daycare and school closings. In kindergartens and schools, children learned, among other things, to fit into a group, to recognize their own needs as well as those of others. In contrast to Spitzer, however, she does believe that such aspects can also be lived in digital formats, for example through virtual work groups or playful digital formats.
In order to make such offers, however, teachers first have to feel comfortable using the digital tools, says Buhl. But many are currently busy making online lessons possible at all.
Regarding the question of possible deficits, the researcher said: “The longer there is no regular teaching, be it face-to-face or distance learning, the greater the risk that skills cannot be built up so well.” Especially with children whose parents do not help with learning could.
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